The CI Capacity Squeeze, and Three Questions To Ask Before 2027 Planning
Authors
Ben Doran
Partner,
Competitive Intelligence
Every year the competitive field gets more crowded: more assets, more readouts, more congress abstracts, more competitor moves to track. Products are more complex too, from special distribution to patient and healthcare professional (HCP) education requirements. And every year, pharma competitive intelligence (CI) teams are asked to cover more of it. What’s changed is that resources aren’t keeping up.
The squeeze, in one line
TGaS Advisors, a division of Trinity, surveys pharma CI leaders about the demands on their teams and the resources available to meet them.
Most pharma CI leaders expect flat or lower budgets and headcount over the next 12 months, yet a majority expect to track more competitors and brands and ingest more data.
Source: TGaS Advisors (a division of Trinity), Pharma CI Landscape Surveys, 2025–2026, as cited in Mike Falvo’s “From Insights to Impact: How AI Is Transforming Pharmaceutical Competitive Intelligence.”
Finding the signal is only the starting point
AI tools can accelerate gathering and summarizing information. The harder part is deciding what a signal means for your brand, and getting that to leadership before plans lock. That step still takes expert judgment, and it’s where many CI teams are stretched thin.
Mike Falvo, Commercial Insights and Advanced Analytics, TGaS Advisors, writes in “From Insights to Impact: How AI Is Transforming Pharmaceutical Competitive Intelligence,” “The real opportunity is to redeploy this reclaimed time from collection to influence.” His perspective highlights the broader enterprise value of CI: not just reporting developments, but helping shape decisions.
Three questions to stress test your CI before 2027 planning
- Do you know your top-priority competitors, and when they’ll launch? Not just the list, but likely labels and how each will commercialize.
- Do you understand the specific threats to your brand? Which competitor scenarios would change your plan, ranked by likelihood and impact.
- Have you built defensible strategies into your brand and launch plans? If a competitor moves next quarter, is the response already in the plan?
What decision-ready intelligence looks like
Monitoring that’s tailored to your competitors and assets. Strategists in your therapeutic areas verify material signals and explain their implications. CI experts work alongside Trinity’s launch, forecasting and market access teams as relevant to the client’s question, helping connect intelligence to the decisions it affects.
The tools you already use can help find the signal. Trinity helps you understand what it means for your brand, in time to inform the decision.